The bank is already in the process of cutting around 9,000 jobs globally, with 4,000 gone so far. The cuts are part of a plan announced by Cryan in late 2015, soon after he became CEO, and most of those job losses are the result of efficiencies created by using technology.

"We're too manual, which can make you error-prone and it makes you inefficient. There's a lot of machine learning and mechanisation that we can do," Cryan said in the FT interview.

Job cuts could extend to Deutsche Bank's branch network as well, he said, noting that customers are increasingly shifting to using online banking functions, rather than going into branches.

"The truth is if I went to a load of branches, I'd wait quite a lot of the day before I encountered [any] customers. They just don't come in as often as they used to," he said.